[orbifold]

I think it entirely depends on how you use tools. Where I currently work people decided that it would be a great idea to extend waf (another niche build system) with all kinds of features. If you ever worked with waf you can probably imagine how bad that can turn out. As long as you stick to bazel’s default features and don’t start to extend it, I’ve found it really pleasant to use especially for C++ and python projects (where you want to expose C++ libraries to python as well). If you start to extend it it can probably become horrible really quickly. The only experience I have with that are abortive attempts at integrating system verilog tools (turned out to be hard) and integrating a custom GCC toolchain (worked fairly well)